Sunday, June 2, 2013

﻿TONY WATCHES MOVIES

Iron Man 3 is the only movie I’ve seen in a movie theater this yearbecause Marvel makes movies worth the price of admission, popcorn,hot dogs and soft drinks...and because my son Eddie wanted to seeit with me. So we did.

Iron Man 3 isn’t quite as good as Iron Man 1, but it’s better thanIron Man 2. Some folks have opined it has too much Tony Starkin it, but they are wrong. Stark is real and brilliantly played byRobert Downey, Jr. while special effects and suits of armor are asnothing to me if they are not in service of great characterizationand story. In this movie, armor and special effects are very coolbecause they serve the story and speak to Stark’s character.

Before seeing the movie, I was concerned about the Mandarin as the villain of the piece. I loved Mandy in my commie-hating youth, buthe hasn’t aged well in the comic books. Suffice to say, I thoughtthe movie did something amazing with the Mandarin and I came thisclose to squealing with delight over it.

That’s as much as I can say about Iron Man 3 without putting up thespoiler warnings. I don’t want to do that because I think you’llenjoy this movie more the less you know going in. I will say I’vealready ordered the Blu-Ray version of the movie. It’s a film thatI will watch again.

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Most of the movies I watch I watch at home. I get them through mylocal library, which is affiliated with 100 other area libraries,or I buy them because I can do so for under $10. Among the moviesI’ve watched recently was a childhood favorite I view every otheryear or so.

Even as a kid I knew the title of The Giant Behemoth (1959), whichI first saw on Ernie “Ghoulardi” Anderson’s Saturday night movieson Cleveland television, was redundant. I didn’t even have to lookup the word “behemoth” because I was one well-read whippersnapper.

The IMDB summarizes the movie thus:

Marine atomic tests cause changes in the ocean's ecosystemresulting in dangerous blobs of radiation and the resurrection ofa dormant dinosaur which threatens London.

Originally titled Behemoth the Sea Monster in the UK, this is oneof director/writer Eugène Lourié three dinosaurs movies, Gorgo andThe Beast from 20,000 Fathoms being the other two. As with thoseother movies, Behemoth is a very masculine monster movie. Outsideof Gorgo’s mom, there is no notable female character in Gorgo. InBeast, we do get a pretty scientist, but she mostly falls in lovewith the movie’s hero and weeps for the death of a beloved mentor.In Behemoth, we get a grieving daughter and that’s it.

The stop-motion animation in Behemoth doesn’t measure up to that inBeast, but there are other notable and pleasant surprises in thismovie. The first is the strong, non-hysteric performances of GeneEvans as an American scientist and André Morell as a respected Britprofessor. Though they are not at all your typical 1950's monstermovie heroes, they add realism to this fantastic thriller.

The movie has strong anti-nuclear testing sentiments I didn’t catchas a kid. Indeed, these sentiments are expressed more forcefullythan in Japan’s Gojira (1954).

Some things I had not previously known were uncovered when I did abit of research into the movie. One is that the screenplay was co-written by blacklisted writer Daniel James as “Daniel Hyatt.” AsDanny Santiago, he wrote Famous All Over Town (1983), a novel abouta Mexican-American family in Los Angeles. There was considerablecontroversy when it was learned “Santiago” was but a pen name fora non-Hispanic author.

The other major revelation for me was that the original conceptionof the Behemoth was an amorphous radioactive blob. Early on in themovie, a fisherman is burned by a small blob caught in rocks on theshore, but the presence of the blob is never explained. I assumedit was some sort of behemoth poop or vomit. Now I know that it wasa holdover from the original story.

The Giant Behemoth still entertains me. If I don’t already own acopy of it, I’ll likely buy one in the near future.

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The Hallow (2004) is a rather mild horror movie I requested from mylocal library for two reasons. The first...I have developed a weefascination with the legendary Headless Horseman. The second...themovie stars a 19-year old Kaley Cuoco, who appears on The Big BangTheory, one of the few sitcoms I watch these days.

That the horror was mild did not surprise me, since I knew the film had originally aired on ABC Family Channel before being released on video. The version I saw seems to have been mostly uncut. It hasthe occasional non-at-all-graphic beheading with the only lingeringshot of a dismembered head coming during a more implied than shownsex scene between two horny teenagers who have, apparently, learnednothing from horror movies.

The movie itself? Mildly entertaining.

A young descendent of Ichabod Crane is the only one who can defeatthe resurrected Horseman and send him back to Hell. The kid is atodds with his football coach dad and attracted to the cute cheerleaderplayed by Cuoco. The latter puts the lad at odds with the footballstar slash bully. It’s a typical mix of teen characters for sucha film, but it doesn’t play out in typical fashion. There are somemoments of genuine suspense.

The acting is decent. Kevin Zegers is the young hero, Nick Carteris the football player. Stacy Keach is the graveyard custodian whoknows the legend of the Headless Horseman and recruits Zegers to dowhat must be done. Other favorites include Judge Reinhold as thehero’s father, Nicholas Turturro as the town sheriff and wonderfulEileen Brennan as a grumpy old rich woman.

I wouldn’t watch The Hollow a second time, but it was an okay wayto kill an hour-and-a-half.

1 comment:

I rarely go to the movies, but took the whole family to see IM3 yesterday. Definitly more entertaining than IM2. I also was ammused with the Mandarin take. I very fondly remember the David Michellne / Bob Layton / John Romita Jr. run, which had a scene where Captain America gave Tony hand-to-hand combat instruction, solike you I very much prefered the Tony Stark scenes to the Iron Man stuff. The ending was disapointing, but all in all it was worth the time and effort.